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Man Reportedly Jailed for Using Lynx
wezzul writes "A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Lynx on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site operator decided that this 'unusual' event in the system log indicated a hack attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him." Honestly, though, aside from a BBC article about a tsunami fund hacking probe that doesn't mention user agents there's little to corroborate this. Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
Just because he was using lynx does not mean he was not trying to break into the site.
While not fair by any means, to me this is clearly an example of one faction of the governments: Setting examples.
;]
I would speculate that the browser inadvertently sent some malformed HTTP POSTS or otherwise made some "usual" as in "unusual garbage posts to credit card processing engine" and spooked the sysadmin who had far to much time on his hand and the local police number on speed dial.
poor bastard..I bet if he was using linux this wouldn't have happend
We *so* need to name a 'Lynx' day in protest. Hit all your favorite sites with a text-based browser in a non-windows OS for one day.
Of course, with all the embedded Flash around, some sites will be totally inaccessible... which would maybe teach them a lesson about accessibility.
"Just because he eats apples doesn't mean he is not a child molester"
Where is the connection of the two? Parent puts some claim in the room, based on a connection which doesn't exist, and is modded up?
So far there is a single, mostly unknown, source for the portions of the story pertaining to Lynx. This is notable more for how opposite the Blogsphere and mainstream media positions are on the story. Currently, only the man arrested knows the real story and I have even seen a quote from him yet. We certainly haven't been exposed to any decent journalism yet.
imagine how many non-standard user agents will be showing up in bt's logs tomorrow.
I bet there's a ton of LWP requests hitting BT as we speak.
It seems the good thing is we're now getting uncorroborated news stories from sites called "Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things". The BBC article makes no mention of lynx user-agent lines as the culprit.
Can we up the bar a LITTLE?
I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing. Hopefully we'll get more info so the words "you got a customer arrested because you were too ignorant to do your job properly?" follow this guy around for his entire career - if justified.
I use lynx regularly, as do many others, any sysadmin who has never heard of it is inexperienced. If someone in a workplace is browsing pr0n for eight hours a day, the only safe way (grannies doing what?) to confirm that the URLs have dodgy content is lynx or similar things, or it's the simplest way to see if your web server is up or not from a console in the cold depths of a server room.
BWAAAHAAAAAHHAAAAA!!! No wait, this is not even funny.
1) The police arrested him because they thought he was hacking stuff, not because he was using Lynx.
2) The police arrest people for insane reasons all the time in 99% of all countries. While I firmly believe there was no evil intent from enyones side in this particular case, you really need to wake up: The police are only human and most of them do whatever the people who pay their bills tell them to (that means the government, not the taxpayer).
3)The fact that the guy was released in a few days shows us that the system is limping along OK. The "sysadmin" making the hacking claim OTOH, should now be arrested for criminal negligence/incompetence or something
Avant is the equivalent of the scented beaks doctors were using during outbreaks of the Black Death in the middle ages ... sure, you might be lucky and not get the plague, but it had nothing to do with your fancy accessories.